


Yesterday

by chronicAngel



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Accidents, Alternate Universe - Human, Blindness, Blood Loss, Car Accidents, Coma, Gen, Heavy Angst, Humanstuck, Loss of Limbs, POV Third Person, Paralysis, Wheelchairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-19 17:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronicAngel/pseuds/chronicAngel
Summary: Sollux shuffles into the room last, and he looks... fine. Absolutely fine.Except he's not fine.





	Yesterday

They are young and stupid.

They are only twelve years old, which is definitely way too young to be driving a car, but they're doing so anyway. Aradia is in the driver's seat, because she's been on joy rides with her sister countless times so she feels confident in saying that she's probably picked up a _few_ things. (Damara only has a learner's permit, but that's still more legal than five twelve-year-olds cramming themselves into Vriska's mom's car.) Sollux sits in the passenger's seat, staring out the window with a bored look on his face but still holding her hand. Tavros and Vriska are arguing in the backseat, with Terezi crammed in between them.

She's never felt better.

Her feet can hardly reach the pedals of the car. She had to scoot the seat all the way forward, and even then she feels like she's only pushing them with her toes. California's highways are relatively un-busy at 4:13 in the afternoon on a Sunday, which surprises Aradia, frankly. Tavros says that it's probably church traffic. Vriska snorts and says that no one goes to church anymore. Then they argue about that, and Aradia turns up the radio to drown them out.

She makes the mistake of glancing away from the road to do so, and when she looks back up, it's hardly in time to veer away from the car they drive right into.

The driver's side door crumples inward and the wind gets knocked out of her as it slams into her side, but she hardly has time to process that as shattered glass flies past her face toward the back seat and her head flies forward until she slams forehead-first into the steering wheel. It is solid wood, and she feels blood trickling down her forehead, stuck somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness. The world around her is black, and she has to assume that her eyes have fallen closed but she can't really open them. She can hear Sollux yelling in panic, hear screams of pain from the backseat, hears people beginning to gather outside their car, and then hears nothing at all.

* * *

She dreams of a world with two moons. One is green, the other purple, and they orbit around each other as much as they orbit around the world around them. She sits in the grass under a tree staring up at them, holding Sollux's hand and smiling. There are voices in her head, urgent but not panicked. They do not talk over each other, but there are still so many of them that she cannot count them, and it begins to make her head pound. Throb. A piercing pain shoots through her head, and she hisses through her teeth and clutches her face. "Is everything okay?" Sollux asks with his stupid, cute little lisp.

"My head hurts," she murmurs. "It hurts so bad..." When she peels her eyes open again, Sollux has stood and is beginning to walk away from her, and she can't pry her hands away from her face to reach out to him. "No, please, don't leave... Don't leave me alone here.

* * *

"My head hurts," she says ever-so-softly in her sleep, and he squeezes his eyes shut because he can't stand looking at her like this. There is still blood on her forehead, starting to dry as they wheel her toward an operating room. He's the only one who didn't receive any serious damage in the accident. He remembers looking into the backseat to see Terezi screaming and crying, clutching her hands to her face. She's the only other person in the car who didn't pass out. She just sat in the back seat, crying and begging for help. He's never seen her so scared. Never seen her anything other than positively gleeful. Vriska had been up for a while, but eventually the blood loss got to her and she passed out. She's already in an operating room now. So is Tavros. And he's here, desperately staring after his girlfriend as she's wheeled away from him.

* * *

When she wakes up, it feels like there are bugs crawling all over her skin, and she wants to scratch, wants to tear at them, but she can't move at all. It feels like all of her limbs are too heavy. She's paralyzed. Completely stuck. She can't even scream, for it feels like there's something lodged in her throat to keep the noise in. She feels like she's stuck there like that for hours until finally a nurse finds her and she sees the woman's eyes go wide before she calls for a doctor.

It's not long before a doctor has come, blinks down at her before instructing her to stay very still while she removes a tube from her throat, murmuring to her that she's being very good the whole time. She feels like she's going to vomit while it's being pulled out, and once it's out she gags, feels bile claw up her throat and forces herself to swallow it before taking in a deep breath of the cold hospital air. Her fingers are curled into the pastel blue sheet of her hospital bed, tears in her eyes.

As the next few hours pass, the pain slowly starts to push its way out of her body. In the end it ends up feeling like the sort of stiffness you get after sleeping wrong, forcing your muscles to tense for the hours that you're unconscious, combined with the same sharp migraine she felt before she passed out. She recognizes that she is in the hospital, and has to assume that the car accident must have caused some sort of damage. It only makes sense, being that the impact was directly on her side. She remembers glass shattering and her head slamming into the steering wheel like it was yesterday.

Then again, for her, it was yesterday.

She doesn't know how long it has been before her mother and sister visit. It feels, plausibly, like it could have been days, but a nurse hasn't yet come in to change the date on her little white board so she knows it has been hours at most. Her mother freezes in the doorway. Though Aradia is sure that they informed her mother that she was alive and well-- or at least alive and conscious-- it seems like the woman is still shocked to actually see it. Damara, on the other hand, hesitates for only a second before throwing herself at Aradia, and she is surprised to feel her sister's arms tight around her.

Neither of the other women in her family have ever been particularly affectionate people. Damara shows her affection in subtle ways, by inviting you to come on a joy ride with her and her boyfriend or leaving you extra macaroni and cheese to pack in your lunch for the next day. Her mother shows affection largely in words, a cold woman who will say she loves you before you leave for school and give no other indication of it.

They have said her whole life that her warmth comes from Dad, and she doesn't really know how that works because her father died in a car accident the day she was born. Beyond that, though, she doesn't feel very warm at all, now. Her sister is hugging her for probably the second or third time in their lives and rather than feeling like she should wrap her arms around her and return the affection, she just feels uncomfortable.

"Wǒmen yǐwéi nǐ bù huì xǐng lái," Damara murmurs into her shoulder, and it takes Aradia a second to translate the Chinese in her head. She's never been as good at it as Damara, and beside that, she still has a persistent feeling of grogginess hanging over her head. _They thought I was dead_, she realizes after a second. _After Dad, what were they supposed to think?_ She realizes after another moment, and guilt sinks in her gut, the first feeling she's really registered since she woke up other than panic.

"You didn't think you could get rid of me that easily, did you?" She croaks after a moment, and then coughs. Her throat is still sore from the tube.

Damara lets out a weak, wet little laugh that only serves to make her feel worse, and when she pulls away there are real tears in her eyes. Aradia has _never_ seen her sister cry, even when they were little. She thinks Damara has always just been too prideful to let her. "I dunno, I haven't had to deal with you for a year. Seems like solidly getting rid of you to me," she teases despite it. Her accent in English is thick, too, even though Aradia hardly has one.

Her stomach churns at the reminder. Though the doctor briefly mentioned how long her coma was, and she of course has seen the date in her hospital room, she hasn't fully processed that a year has passed.

* * *

Days pass, and she doesn't talk to anyone after that. Even her doctor and the nurses can't get her to speak, and they worry that it's a side effect of the coma, though they have no explanation for why it would be delayed. In reality, she just feels too guilty and displaced to talk. She doesn't know how to talk to anyone anymore. She has been in a hospital bed on life support for a year while they've just continued to grow and move on with their lives. And sure, the people who love her have visited and been worried about her for that year, but she can't be the person they were visiting nor can she be the person she was before that.

She learns that she woke up on a Tuesday, which feels so strange for her because it forces her to remember how much school she must have missed. She has to wonder if she will be forced to repeat the seventh grade, or if she will simply have to make it up in the hospital so she may be allowed to go to the same classes as all of her friends again. A private part of her wonders if she has to go back to school at all. She used to be so passionate about academics, but it's hard not to feel numb to the whole thing now. After all, it hardly mattered when she was getting her head smashed into a steering wheel on a highway she should never have been on.

By Saturday, her throat feels better from the tube, but she still does not open her mouth except to eat (she doesn't even drink, the IVs still plugged into her arms giving her the fluids that she needs).

At least, she doesn't open her mouth until visiting hours.

It's not quite two in the afternoon when they come into her room, and she stares at all of them with wide eyes because she does not know what else to do. Tavros is the first to enter the room, and she supposes he is forced to be in front of everyone because he is in a wheelchair. She wonders how many times he ran over their feet in the last year before they made that rule. Terezi is next, and Aradia's eyes catch on her tacky red shades. Just faintly through the shaded lenses, she can see scars around her eyes. Vriska has one arm at her side, the other, clearly a prosthetic, raised to tangle her fingers nervously in her hair, which is all pushed in front of one side of her face.

Sollux shuffles into the room last, and he looks... fine. Absolutely fine.

Except he's not fine.

She has known him for years and she can recognize the way he stares at his feet and sucks his lower lip between his teeth guiltily. It's the same body language he adopts when he's trying to lie to his brother, or when he'd tried to shoplift one time when they were ten because she had said she was craving Snickers and neither of them got allowances like some of their classmates.

"Alright, can we all stop being so quiet and mopey?" Terezi says, the first to break the silence after nearly a full minute of it. She walks slowly toward Aradia's bed until she can sit on the edge of it, and then she wraps her arms tight around her friend. Aradia is still too stunned to hug her back. "I knew you'd wake up. You're too stubborn to let Vriska's dumb joyriding idea take you out."

Aradia lets out a startled laugh and Vriska scowls in the corner, murmuring something Aradia can't quite hear but which sounds a lot like _You all agreed to it. _Terezi peels herself away from her to smile, as ear-to-ear as it's always been.

Terezi scoots off of the bed and Tavros wheels his way over, careful to avoid running over the IV lines. He was her best friend in the world, once. They grew up in the same neighborhood, met when they were four years old and were practically attached at the hip every day after that. His older brother dated her sister, which was probably the worst mistake any Nitram had ever made until the Joyriding Incident, although she supposes it's noteworthy that Tavros was practically dragged into it. At the very least, he was the only one who protested the idea. "Hey," he offers weakly after a moment, his voice deeper and more nasally than it was last time she heard it. Only marginally, though.

She wants to say something. Wants to greet him back. She just smiles weakly instead.

Vriska does not bother to come over and say anything, which Aradia supposes must be because she at least partially blames herself for the whole thing, even if she'd never admit that. Aradia can recognize guilt on _her_ face, too. Instead, after a long moment, Sollux shuffles over, staring at her quietly for a long time. She supposes neither of them knows exactly what to say to the other. She wants to ask him a thousand questions. She wants to know if he was actually harmed in any way. She wants to know if he's started dating other people, while she was in the coma. She wants to know if he thought she would wake up. She wants to know how the incident changed him-- how it changed all of them, other than her. Instead she just smiles weakly and says, "You're so tall..."

**Author's Note:**

> "_Wǒmen yǐwéi nǐ bù huì xǐng lái._" = "We thought you wouldn't wake up."


End file.
